Higher Ed Storytelling University

John Azoni (00:02.432)
All right, cool. You promised your name Casey Hill, right? Pretty straightforward. And all right, any questions or should we just jump in?

Casey Hill (00:08.206)
Pretty straightforward.

Casey Hill (00:13.279)
I don't think so. I think let's get into it. Let's talk LinkedIn.

John Azoni (00:16.372)
Alright, cool. So they will have heard my little theme song intro. And so we'll pick up by when I just start introducing you here. So

All right, my guest today is Casey Hill. Casey is a growth veteran with over a decade of experience in helping software companies scale fast. So whether it's garnering millions of views on Quora and LinkedIn or pioneering new growth levers, like booking his team on hundreds of podcasts, Casey is always looking for creative and value-led ways to grab attention and break from the mold. So in his current role leading growth at Active Campaign, he's building organic growth engines to propel the team to $1 billion with a B

Casey Hill (00:23.982)
Sounds great.

John Azoni (00:53.838)
annual recurring revenue. So, and so we've got Casey on the show today to talk about, we're gonna zero in on LinkedIn strategies and I'm excited to get into this. So Casey, welcome to the show.

Casey Hill (01:06.582)
Thank you so much for having me, John. I'm excited to be here.

John Azoni (01:09.98)
Yeah, it's great to have you. So I looked up some LinkedIn statistics before this. The dates for these articles were very scattered. Some I'm like, oh, this is a good one. Then I look at the article, it's like from 2014. But what I can confidently say is in 2023, Pew Research Center did a social media use study, LinkedIn remains popular with college students.

Further research into LinkedIn statistics revealed over 40, or I'm sorry, over 50% of adults who have a bachelor's or advanced degree in the US are LinkedIn users while the site engages only 10% of people whose education doesn't surpass high school. So for, it seemed, maybe seemed counterintuitive for college students, you know, to be on LinkedIn. We think we would find them on TikTok and Instagram, which we do. But there's,

potential here for LinkedIn for reaching prospective students, but also for higher ed marketers to be influencers to the higher ed marketing community.

Casey Hill (02:15.018)
Yeah, 100%. I mean, I think that you see that LinkedIn as a channel has evolved a lot, right? Like LinkedIn used to be this kind of job board. That was the early stage LinkedIn. It's like people posting jobs, people finding it. And it's really changed a lot to more of a thought leadership channel where people are posting firsthand experiences, people are posting unique observations, and people are networking and they're getting, you know, basically connected in to other folks in their circles. And so as part of that evolution, I think it's actually become a really interesting channel.

that brands have been able to leverage to draw attention in higher education as well as other markets across the board.

John Azoni (02:51.348)
Yeah, and just thinking about how many businesses are on LinkedIn to and recruiters sourcing, you know, LinkedIn profiles for hiring. One of the things we know about higher education is that the number one thing that students care about, you know, statistically right now is employability after graduation. So it makes sense that a lot of them are on LinkedIn and kind of getting a jumpstart on that or if they're graduate level, you know,

and things like that. But I want to kick us off before we jump into all that. Tell me something that people would be surprised to know about you.

Casey Hill (03:32.554)
Um, surprise to know. So an interesting fact is that I've actually launched a board game business. So I did a kickstarter that was 800 funded and we sold thousands of copies of a game called Archon, which is a small strategy card game on kickstarter, uh between 2018 and 2019. So that was a that was a fun experience and uh, probably not too common.

John Azoni (03:54.576)
Awesome. Can you buy this in the stores?

Casey Hill (03:57.93)
I currently do not have the online store anymore. I just had too many plates up in the air. If someone reaches out to me personally, I'll hook you up. We still have some copies on hand, but the overall online store is not currently operational.

John Azoni (04:13.76)
That's really interesting. What led to starting a game?

Casey Hill (04:17.918)
Yeah, it's just been something that I was passionate about. I grew up in a family of seven and gaming was a way that we kind of got everyone connected in as a family. And so my whole life, I grew up playing board games, playing strategy games. So I wanted to take kind of my background, which had been in software and marketing tech and see if I could apply it to an area that I was really passionate about, which was board games. And so it was really fun to do that and to test a lot of these things that I've been doing for companies for years.

All these different email marketing strategies, running paid Facebook ads, running sponsorships, doing podcast appearances, and essentially apply it for my own business and paying with my own dollars. And so I'm grateful for the experience. I think I learned a lot.

John Azoni (05:01.772)
That's cool. And that's why I'm glad we got you on. It's one of those episodes where, you know, we like to have a lot of guests on here that are from outside the higher ed bubble. And you bring a lot of, you know, outside of the higher ed experience in growth and things like that. You're currently recently at Active Campaign, doing a lot with, you know, social media and growth for Active Campaign. I follow you on LinkedIn. Your posts are great. But let's start off with like, tell us about Active Campaign.

I've used it. It's a email, you know emailing platform kind of like MailChimp or something like that I've used it in my in my previous job, but for people who don't know tell us what it is and what you do there

Casey Hill (05:42.57)
Yeah, yeah. So ActiveCampaign is like a marketing automation platform. So essentially it has two kind of major buckets. One is an email marketing piece where you can set up automations and you can be reaching out to folks. But I think one of the cool parts about it is there's a lot of sophistication. So versus you kind of have your basic email tools. So things like you mentioned, like MailChimp or ConvertKit. And then when you're wanting to run a little bit more advanced logic, have a little bit more personalization, maybe have some omnichannel approaches, you try.

SMS or personal letters or different things like that to work in that's kind of where active campaign can be a really effective tool So that's kind of the marketing piece and then it's also a CRM engine meaning that you can manage Relationships as you know people are coming in and you're trying to track Customer relationships vendor relationships you can keep track of all of that under one hood So that is essentially the bubble of active campaign and what I do is I work on the organic marketing side

So essentially my job is to find non-paid, i.e. not paid ads, ways to grow the organization. And so I do a handful of different levers. One of those that I think we'll dig into a little bit more is specifically around LinkedIn.

John Azoni (06:55.456)
So tell us what have you been working with your team on with LinkedIn? Cause we talked yesterday or pre-chat about, there's like this 10,000 views club and the whole philosophy of like, you wanting your whole team to be getting views and not just you being the one expert that knows how to get traction on LinkedIn. Tell me about that.

Casey Hill (07:17.566)
100%. So I think one of the mistakes that people make is there's this whole thing around like personal brand and personal brands driving business. And I think they absolutely can drive business. But I think one of the challenges is what you want to do is you want to build a system. You don't want to have one person who drives a lot of impact for you. And then they leave and then you lose all of that momentum. So one of the things I was keen to do when I came on board active campaign was to start to mobilize the entire team. So we created a Slack channel called Operation LinkedIn.

And I'm sharing courses that I've built. I'm sharing post examples. I'm reviewing people's content. And I'm trying to essentially coach up everyone in that channel. We have 45 folks that are part of Operation LinkedIn and try to make those people also ambassadors of the active campaign brand. So this becomes a scalable system that we could implement as a company. And the 10K club is a mark. So 10,000 impressions per week on your content.

So that can be from one post or it can be from five posts. Doesn't matter. We can kind of get into strategy of tempo or how often to post in a little bit. But it's really cool to see people going from getting 400 views to getting 1,000, to getting 5,000, to getting 8,000, and then they break that 10,000 and we celebrate it. And we kind of look at what helped that person move in many ways very quickly. I think oftentimes people think like, oh, if I'm at 400 views,

There's no way like 10,000 feels like this far off thing, but we have people getting there in just a few weeks with some coaching and some looking and kind of how they approach it. So it's been really exciting to see that side. And then just as a quick top level view, my approach to channel strategy on a channel like LinkedIn is to have not only our team posting thought leadership, I try to think of this as topical authority, good, powerful stories.

John Azoni (08:47.425)
Wow.

Casey Hill (09:11.446)
that allow our team to be seen as experts in a relative space. And that might be different, this is a really important part, that might be different for different folks in the organization. I talk a lot about organic growth and marketing and email optimization, because that's what I know. That's my last 10 plus years of experience. But someone in sales will have different experience. And so that's all part of building authority in different areas. And I think that's great. And people shouldn't just be cookie cutter, regurgitating blog articles. People should post about what they know.

John Azoni (09:16.684)
Mm-hmm.

Casey Hill (09:41.482)
And in addition to that thought leadership, we're also trying to bring as many customers as we can to be posting and to be advocates. And I think this is so important. So whether it's your customers or whether it's your alumni or whoever is associated, it's really important to try to get those outside voices to be amplifying and to be advocates for you. Because when they're promotional, it's seen in a different light as when you as an employee are promotional. And I think there's something very powerful and we're already seeing

a ton of velocity from getting that dozen plus folks talking about their experiences with ActiveCampaign every single week on LinkedIn as a channel. And then as a third lever, we also run some paid ads and primarily those ads are what we call thought leadership ads, meaning that instead of just a bland, you know, hey, go check out our product, they're actually promoting valuable posts that have content that is teaching things.

So it's changing this lens to what if ads were actually educational? What if ads could actually add value? Which is a concept I'm really excited about. So that's kind of our three pronged attack to LinkedIn as it stands right now.

John Azoni (10:48.096)
That's really cool. I like the idea of, yeah, especially what you said, the ads providing value. You know, a lot of it's a far cry from just like a static image that's just this active campaign or some clever thing. What are you seeing right now? Like just in general on LinkedIn, you mentioned.

you know, people just regurgitating blog posts. I see that a lot too, and it drives me nuts. I see it a lot from like accountants, like financial planning community. It's like, okay, here's five tips to prepare for retirement. And they didn't even write it. It was like, they're just, you know, it's a lob, they're just kind of lobbing something out there. But what kind of stuff like that are you seeing that people need to kind of change their mindset about?

Casey Hill (11:36.914)
Yeah, for sure. So the first high level thing, it's so critical and it's so important is to use firsthand experience and use specifics. If nothing else lands throughout this entire talk, that those two buckets are critical to being effective on LinkedIn. So the first is there's so much generalized content that one of the ways you're standing out is you're actually talking about an actual experience that you have had.

And I always tell people, because people get intimidated, well, if I'm not an executive, if I'm not a C class, can I, is my insight really valuable? And my answer is absolutely. I got my first 1 million views on LinkedIn as an SDR and as an AE in sales, right? I was an entry level employee, and I was just talking about what I was learning, what I was testing out. Hey, after I finished my cold calls, I tried to do some door knocking. I tried to do this social strategy. I tried to do this other thing, and here are my results.

And sure enough, LinkedIn, a platform that has hundreds of millions of folks on it, they will resonate because they're at that same stage. So the first thing is don't feel as if you need to be some super tenured veteran to be successful on LinkedIn. You just need to share real stuff, real learnings, real observations, real conversations. That is a huge piece. And part of what feeds that is to use specifics, use actual data. So if I'm talking about my experience,

Instead of just saying, oh, you know, outside of my standard cold calling, I also tried a social strategy. Get into this. How many outreaches did I do? What did that actual the structure of that look like? So if I sent a pitch, what was the actual pitch? Share the actual pitch, break it down, analyze it. That's what lends credibility to it, right? It makes it feel like, OK, not only are you sharing real experience, but I trust that it's real experience because you're actually breaking it down and you're using specifics. So those are two.

John Azoni (13:18.828)
Mm-hmm.

Casey Hill (13:28.014)
top level, absolutely vital pieces. And I think that a lot of times people feel intimidated from a company standpoint, they're like, oh, but can I share the secret sauce? Am I sharing too much? My vantage point is this, I know every company is gonna be a little bit different. Sure, there's gonna be certain confidential things that you shouldn't share and you should try to talk with your team internally and be aware. But 95% of the time, what you can do is you can share

John Azoni (13:41.129)
Mm-hmm.

Casey Hill (13:58.102)
breaking those confidentiality clauses and without it being problematic, it's more of the mental block of you kind of shifting how you approach content. So I strongly encourage people time and time again to embolden their teams around that concept as well and embolden people to say, sharing the specifics is how you will be successful. So change your mindset there and make sure to have your team feel empowered to do the same.

John Azoni (14:24.82)
Yeah, that's great. I think it reminds me of what I see as really popular, you know, on reels and TikTok and things like that, is these get ready with me videos, you know, with these influencer gals that are just doing their makeup. And I'm like, that's super simple, but it's kind of like this idea of like, just come along this journey with me and we're actually gonna do this together, you know? And I think that that's really...

You know impactful and this the content that I resonate with a lot is that kind of stuff like here's how I actually tried This and here's what was the result, you know, I tried to do a month of you know Starting a business start starting online business and then and here's the result Here's what the gurus were telling me they were telling me to be super easy But here's what actually happened and I think that's I think that's really that's really key because I think that That's what I see a lot of higher ed mark

marketers posting and maybe that's just my algorithm is trained like that but a lot of like kind of like marketer to marketer content and trying new things so I really yes good advice to like kind of take that and pitch it as more like here's actually what I did what about like what would you say someone that's like trying things and it's not working you know they don't have they don't have like a the punchline is not one of success

Casey Hill (15:54.334)
Yeah, for sure. So yeah, for sure. So I deal with this all the time, right? I've consulted for many, many years around LinkedIn and I'm training people all the time in my team. And so we see all the time where people feel like they're stuck and sometimes it's just you need to change your style. Sometimes it's around the hook specifically or the graphic but here's a couple top level things I would think about. So the first is you're using specifics, right? But beyond that, there's also something in that hook where you need to have some sort of authority.

John Azoni (15:54.536)
You know.

Casey Hill (16:23.49)
to also deliver that trust. So that's an important thing that can be missing from a lot of folks. They think about the curiosity. Hey, I'm gonna draw attention by saying something maybe slightly controversial, or I'm gonna leave them hanging on some, you know, provocative statement, but there's no authority around it. So that's something that you can try if you're struggling. There's a reason that people will, you know, PR will start with ex-Google, you know, executive says XYZ or ex-NASA or ex-

You know, there's a reason they use that is because it draws in and it pulls authority to a statement. So if you're making comments out there and you're struggling, one of the things that you might do is find out who else is talking about that subject. You can actually use AI to help you in this. So let's say I want to do a post about feature bloat. I'm like, all these software companies are so bloated. They're trying to add everything in. I've actually done this. I've tested this. I go to chat GPT and I can go say,

tech executives are talking about feature blow. It'll give me a list, boom, boom. I can even narrow it down by industry. I'll say, what podcast did they hop on where they were talking about it? It gives me a list of five podcasts. Now, I always tell people anything AI related, spot check it, make sure it's not lying to you. But 90% of the time when I do that and I spot check it, it's accurate. So this is a great way to quickly draw in authority statements, find out who else is talking about these key issues.

John Azoni (17:37.837)
for sure.

Casey Hill (17:49.666)
that can help substantiate your experience. Now it's not just coming from you, but it's coming from you plus the backing of this other research that you've compiled. So that would be one of the first checkpoints I would have around that. The second thing I would...

John Azoni (18:05.undefined)
Is the AI, like is the chat GPT, is it sourcing? Cause my understanding is it only goes up to 2021. So how would you know that like people are today talking about that stuff?

Casey Hill (18:17.374)
Yeah, it's a great question. Yeah, so right now you do have a time gap. So you're gonna find conversations about certain topics, but it will not be over those last two years. So that's a great point that something that you need to be aware of, as that is a limitation of the research tool, you can obviously do manual research too, right? You can go in and into Google and you can start typing certain subjects, or you can search, you can go to things like ListenNotes as a database for podcasting specifically that I really like, and you can actually...

type in phrases into ListenNotes and search for podcasts that have mentioned topics around that recently. So that would be another way that you might be able to address that for podcasting specifically over the last two years.

John Azoni (18:59.18)
So seeing what's already working, and then pulling from that. Sorry, I interrupted you. You were gonna say something beyond that.

Casey Hill (19:10.434)
No, no, I think I was just gonna dive into, I wanna drill home too that with specifics, strongly encouraging folks wherever possible to draw in data. I think data can be really powerful as part of what substantiates a claim that you make. So even if you're using firsthand experience and you're talking about some specific firsthand examples, see if you can add a little bit more data to that conversation and that might help strengthen the content that you're doing.

For example, I went to UC Berkeley and on Quora, I actually talked quite a bit about my experience from UC Berkeley. And one of the things that I found was a common tenant amongst my quote unquote viral posts in that overall sphere is like I would say, hey, Berkeley has 52 Nobel laureates in these specific areas. And I would like kind of get into the actual data and the irrefutable pieces that I could use if I was trying to make a claim for instance that

I think that we excel in chemistry over other XYZ program, I would bring in actual data to make sure that was kind of drawn in. So that's another thing that people who might be struggling could test.

John Azoni (20:23.976)
Yeah, so definitely like hooking people with building curiosity, you know, that is, we're not saying that's not important. It's definitely very important, but also establishing right away that authority, but then backing that up with data. You, I actually found you through this post that you did just a

about a week ago, for an example of this, you said you published the same post but with two different hooks. Version one was recently I sat down with Nick Metta, I don't know if I'm pronouncing that right, CEO of Gainsight to discuss how to scale your organization. That's version one. Version two was Nick Metta runs Gainsight, a company that Vista acquired for $1.1 billion. He knows a thing or two about scaling organizations. And you said that version two got 10 times the view of the first one.

That's pretty cool. Tell me, just tell me more about that. How did you run that test?

Casey Hill (21:26.078)
Yeah, so I basically wanted to do this test, a different hook. So I know that I couldn't do it like back to back. So there was actually a gap of, I want to say like two to three months between when I ran those. But I actually just looked back at a post where I was like, I really feel like this is really good content and it didn't perform as well as I thought it might be able to. So I wanted to try different hooks on the same core content and see if I could, you know, kind of stress test that. And so I went in and I took again this tenant of.

using specifics, right? I use the 1.1 billion number, but I also use authority. I realize lots of people have no idea what Gainsight is. So if I just say I sat down with the CEO of Gainsight, people are like, I have no idea who that is. So like, why does that create any emotional response? But as soon as someone sees, hey, they sold their company for over a billion dollars, instantly the person's mind's like, okay, this person obviously knows something about this space. They've been incredibly successful. And I think that...

Immediately draws more interest into why they would want to pay attention and a small note This is an odd thing, but I've tested this a ton of times actually writing out 1.1 billion like writing the full number out instead of doing like 1.1 B actually performs better as well So I think there's something about like people see that it's like the magnitude of the number That's kind of a small minutiae piece. But yeah, it was cool to run that test and to see that firsthand contrast

John Azoni (22:36.481)
Yeah.

John Azoni (22:43.094)
Yeah.

John Azoni (22:49.976)
So when people, when higher ed marketers are wanting to reach college students, maybe to get them to transfer or to get them to come to their school in the first place or for a grad program, what kind of content would you suggest, with this in mind of like hooking them with some sort of authority data, that kind of thing? Cause they're not necessarily looking for authority on higher ed marketing strategies. They might be looking for something.

Casey Hill (23:17.74)
Yeah.

John Azoni (23:19.764)
just snowball or just what it was just spitballing that there it is i almost said free balling i'm like i don't think that's the right that's not the word

Casey Hill (23:24.106)
Spitball. Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I think that it obviously can depend on different audiences, but I think as a starting point, things like notable research, things like your university just came out with some cutting edge new AI piece or one of the alumni of your university just started some super successful startup, each department might have slightly different things that resonate. But the first thing is,

something that is actually unique, generic language that you have world-class leaders and world-class instructors and all this like fluff jargon language, like nobody cares about that. That's generic and it's not differentiable. But as soon as you talk about something specific that an alumni did or a specific piece of research or maybe even things like sports programs are gonna be relevant to folks and you talk about a specific accomplishment, there can be a lot of angles for you to mobilize. And what I again would recommend

is to have, as a university, different people. Some of them are from programs, some of them are from sports, some of them are from across the board and have them posting about what they know. And that's part of this strategy right now. Suddenly people are seeing, oh, there's this really cool research piece that came out from here. And oh, I saw that the average grad is making $110,000 five years post-graduation. Whoa, that's kinda cool. And then you're just layering in all of these touch points.

that might resonate with these tens of millions of people who are in that zone of trying to decide whether to transfer, trying to decide what university, and you're piquing their interest by things that they care about. They wanna be part of a school that gets them a good job once they graduate. They wanna be part of a school that has an exciting culture that is active and vigorous. They wanna be part of a school that's putting out incredible research that's changing the world and making an impact.

So all of those are specific to you as a university, and I think can be the type of content that will drive a lot of eyes and a lot of intake. So there's that storytelling side, and it goes in contrast to what I see a lot happens in the higher ed space, is just kind of like generic announcements where they're just talking about overall things that aren't that applicable to the actual student, right? And so if you're talking about things like

Casey Hill (25:48.074)
you know, acceptance rates or you're talking about things that are just overall kind of fluff, there's not really like a student benefit. So in some ways, like the stuff that I've talked about, trying to think about like, why would people get excited about that? And that emotional connection is I think what will help drive you the most intent and actual kind of traffic, if you will, from your LinkedIn content.

John Azoni (26:09.812)
Yeah, I love that getting specific and that's a key tenant of storytelling is getting specific. And I think too many organizations think they're telling stories when really they're just kind of giving broad high level information. They're doing the world class professors, small class sizes and stuff. And they put it to an emotional song and they go check. We told our story. You know, it's like, but no, like you're the stories illustrate.

the value. They illustrate the impact that you're having.

And the stories are in the specifics. You know, it's a time when a student and a professor had an impactful relationship that changed that student's life because of the small class sizes. You know, it's an example of something that a faculty member has worked on that's changed the world in some way. You know, it's, we had, I went to an art school here in Detroit. One of the famous stories that gets re-shared

One of the alumni created and I think she was in like product design or something like that and she created like this special winter jacket for Homeless individuals and it's a jacket that then can like I don't know It's it's crafted in a way that then can like fold out into a sleeping bag You know and then and then you can fold it back up and now it's a jacket so like just that kind of stuff where it's like

show us some what's cool like what's cool that you're learning and that just doing that says like wow she learned how to do that at ccs that's crazy you know um so yeah that's great i think specifics is something that people i don't see nearly enough of that on linkedin

Casey Hill (27:55.914)
100% and so I think that as you, you know, what's interesting is in many ways universities can follow I think a very similar blueprint to what we're doing an active campaign and seeing so much success from which is Get your team all posting and get them going out there and the employees of the university Highlighting these really cool stories, but then go also connect in with your alumni See if you can have them share some stories see if you can have them talk about you know Fast forward five years and here's where things are at

And if someone feels that strong sense of affinity, you know, if Berkeley reached out, I have a very positive experience from my time at Berkeley, if they had reached out in the business department and said, hey Casey, we love what you're doing, would you be open to kind of sharing where you're at now and what the connection with your classwork was and kind of propelling? I would be more than happy to do that. I'd be more than happy to tag them in on a post and say, hey, when Guy Kawasaki...

You know, Apple's evangelists came in and talked that left such an indelible impression on me. And, you know, I really liked the structure when they had debate classes where they had two people, two senators or congressmen of totally different views would come and debate a subject. I liked being exposed to that difference of opinion. It's the exact type of thing they want out there, but they're finding someone to amplify it, right? Who already has an audience potentially like myself. And so I think I would encourage them.

to not only mobilize their internal team, but reach out to the extensive network, they have huge networks, right, of people that have attended these universities and use them as amplifiers, because that can also provide a 10X effect to what you can even do internally with your team.

John Azoni (29:33.897)
That's great. That's a nut that a lot of schools have tried to crack. How do you incentivize people to post on your behalf in a way that doesn't seem like a sponsored post or something like that? So as an alum, I like that, just someone reaching out to you. What would be like, is there like a, from your experience as an alum of a college,

and you're saying that if they reached out to you, you would totally participate in that. Is there kind of like a scalable system that you've seen work rather than, because I've talked to some people that are involved in this, like kind of reaching out to influencers. And one of my friends, he's like, it's just hand-to-hand combat. You're just reaching out directly, building a relationship with them. And that's great, but not scalable. Is there any, is there...

Anything that you could suggest that a university could put into practice that might be a little more less like one to one time intensive or is just that the answer? It's just it's not a scalable process.

Casey Hill (30:42.894)
I think there's two sides of it. So I think it absolutely can be a scalable process. So some people might be just genuinely passionate and they'll do it just because they feel that connection into the university. Like I'm probably an example of that. Like if someone reached out, I would probably do that just because I'm passionate about Berkeley and I would wanna support them. But there's another side of this, which is, what does that recipient care about? So let's say I was on the fence. I'm like, maybe, but I'm not quite sure. What if they reached out and said, we love to highlight top performing

business folks that come from our university. We've seen your content, we've seen you're getting millions and millions of views on LinkedIn. And we would love to write a piece in our business department about what you're doing. Would you be open to doing kind of a post highlighting some of the experiences that you've had and in exchange, we'd love to highlight you in this local business newsletter or whatever. Now I'm kind of sitting here thinking, oh, okay. Like I might be interested in that. I've taught some classes at UCSD. I've been interested in potentially teaching at other universities.

And maybe this is a way for me to build some relationships in with a university like Berkeley that could be a springboard for me working at some of those elite top level universities in the future. So that's where my wheels start to go. And so I think a good litmus test, and this is something we experiment with all the time. When I started my, I call it social amplification campaign, mobilizing our customers, I basically just came at it. No, I wasn't giving anything. I'm saying, I'd love to hear your story. I don't want all of our content to come from us.

Are you open to sharing? So that was one approach we tried. And we got a lot of folks who were passionate, who decided that, yeah, we'll help. But then we started experimenting with, well, what else do they care about? How can we support them? So one thing we found is that people that are on channels like LinkedIn, they care about followers and reach of their content. And so one of the things that I could give is I could say, look, I have a marketing team of 50 people and I'll hop onto whatever content you want and we'll like, we'll engage, we'll comment, we'll give you more reach. We had folks reaching out and saying,

That was so amazing. That was the best performing post of the year because you guys had 40 people comment on it. And I've never had 40 comments on a post in my life. So I looked at what can we leverage free, right? We're not paying anything for these things, but what can we quickly leverage on our side? So again, there's a little bit of a digression, but I think the top thing I would tell them to think about is what does the recipient care about? And how is a university, can you try to add value, visibility to them in that sense? And I think

John Azoni (32:42.869)
Yeah.

Casey Hill (33:06.206)
A lot of people like to feel elevated. They like to feel like they're in the spotlight. So that's a low hanging fruit of what value service you can deliver in exchange for getting them to activate and post about you.

John Azoni (33:18.868)
Yeah, that's like the art of negotiation in general. It's like, find out what the other side wants. Like what's in it for them versus what's in it just for you. This, you know, the Michael Scott win-win-win situation. That's cool. So you sent me...

some stuff about LinkedIn updates to the algorithms. And I wanna get into that because there's some really interesting stuff in here that I think people will get a lot of immediate bang for their buck on or whatever. So let's talk about that. Like what are some of these changes that are going on? How can higher ed marketers harness these?

Casey Hill (33:59.914)
Yeah, for sure. So I'll start with kind of the most basic one, which is that post frequency. I used to be a person who would recommend, hey, you want to post maybe once every few days. You don't want to flood out too many posts at once because it's going to cannibalize your views. The algorithm in many ways has changed to kind of treat each post independently. There still is a little bit like if you post and you post like an hour later, I still think that the second post will get less velocity.

But as long as you give it like a four hour window is usually the marker that I've seen when I look at the data, you can kind of post at whatever frequency makes sense and each post will perform independently. So I went from posting maybe two to three times a week to right now where I'm getting some of the most views per week of my entire career, I'm posting seven to 10 times. And of those seven to 10 times, I'll always get a handful that every single week that won't perform well, right? Three to four posts every week will be low performing.

I'll get some middle ones and then I'll occasionally get those ones that really blow up. So the idea is that the algorithm is kind of taking your post, it's serving it to a general audience and it's seeing how much that general audience engages on it and then that decides how much they wanna kind of amplify it. So one thing I would say is, if you wanna post more frequently, feel emboldened to do that. Another thing that is interesting that they recently added is,

they have this new thing, this LinkedIn learning where they have collaborative articles. So if you go into different people's profiles, you might see these badges, like mine says top marketing voice. Well, the way that you get that is you actually contribute to these AI generated articles and there's hundreds of different topics that you essentially can, that you can write in and become an expert. So there's hundreds of different types of badges. And if you click throughout profiles, you'll see.

There's some in engineering, there's some in sales, there's some in social selling. I mean, it gets really specific. But all you really have to do to tap in and get those badges is go to that LinkedIn Learning, those collaborative articles, you'll see dozens and dozens of options and just hop in and make comments to the AI. There's an AI generated article and right next to it will say make a contribution and you just add some perspective. And I found that usually after you do a few dozen of those, if you can...

Casey Hill (36:16.226)
get some decent attention, as in you get a couple likes, a couple people note that that's insightful, that'll help give you that badge. So that's a new thing, it's recent, it was implemented, I wanna say maybe two to three months ago, but it's great as a way to help build your authority. I definitely recommend it. And another thing that is kinda cool is, you can search for subjects. I don't think a lot of people know this. So there's a little ability for you to type in, like I can type in marketing automation into my search bar.

John Azoni (36:27.733)
Okay.

Casey Hill (36:44.522)
And before I click search, there's gonna be a little bell on the right-hand side. So type in a phrase, it could be email marketing, it could be whatever you're looking for, and look for that little bell right next to the search bar. And if you click that, it'll actually remind you, it'll actually send you notification when people are talking about different subjects. So this is a great way, if you're trying to get more involved in a certain niche, and you wanna jump in and engage and talk with folks, you have the ability to do that.

by tapping into that. So definitely something that I encourage folks to kind of be aware of in terms of that. Another thing that's pretty interesting is that they just implemented an ad library. So what this means is, let's say there's other universities that are running ads on LinkedIn. You can literally search them and it will show you every single ad that person is running. You can read their copy and depending on...

John Azoni (37:40.844)
Hmm.

Casey Hill (37:42.006)
the company and are depending on the brand and where they're located, you can even sometimes see demographic information. So this has been really interesting. We search all of our major competitors and we can know what ads they're running on LinkedIn, what exact positioning and copy, and especially for any of these companies operating in the EU that has very strict privacy, like, you know, you need to disclose things we can literally see they ran it for these two weeks.

to these specific countries, to these specific demographics, I mean, you get very specific information on their targeting. So that's just another interesting way, if you're trying to research a little bit, and well, what are the major players doing? You know, does Harvard advertise on LinkedIn? What kind of ads does Harvard run, right? Like you can do that legwork, and that will help inform your strategy if you wanna try, say, a paid motion, as an example. So a couple different tools that you have that I think have come out recently,

John Azoni (38:14.305)
Wow.

Casey Hill (38:36.502)
that are great things you can take advantage of to kind of amplify your performance on

John Azoni (38:41.076)
Yeah, that's great. And then a couple other ones that were interesting. Don't tag people in a post if they're not gonna engage. Tell me about that, because I see that a lot. Like, you know, people will come up with a reason to tag. Maybe they had like a brief mention in an article or something like that. And so, oh, I can tag that person. And then you get a list of people that are like tagging all these people. Yeah.

Casey Hill (38:49.069)
Mmm.

Casey Hill (39:05.61)
Yeah. So I actually talked with someone from LinkedIn around this. So it was really interesting exploring this. Essentially what happened was people were just tagging, like people would tag popular people constantly. And what was happening is it used to be every time you tag someone, they would get a notification. So these people were just like flooded with all of these notifications and LinkedIn's like, this isn't a good experience. This person doesn't want to be flooded with hundreds of notifications just because they're popular and they're getting tagged and stuff they're not even involved in. So they basically made it so that.

really tagging is supposed to be for when you tie in someone who you know is going to engage in that content you actually have a relationship with. So the algorithm, if you tag in someone on an article you collaborated with or someone who's involved and they hop into the comments and they respond to that, great, no issues. But if you have a pattern of tagging people who never engage, LinkedIn is actually gonna throttle that content. They're gonna reduce the exposure and the reach because they're looking at it and they're saying,

They're tagging these people that aren't actually involved or actually engaged. So it's a great kind of just overall best practice. It is okay to tag people, but two things I would recommend. Number one, I typically recommend trying to tag in the comments instead of tagging in the post body itself. I think that has less chance to throttle your actual content. And I would encourage people to only tag folks they're in communications with. Hey, we're about to post this article this Friday. We're going to be dropping you a tag. Uh, just wanted to let you know, give you a heads up.

That kind of thing is good because then the person will know to expect it. And even if they don't get the notification, they can come in, they can comment and you can not have that adverse effect, but yeah, good best practice.

John Azoni (40:43.38)
Yeah, speaking of comments, this was one that I gravitated towards is, you say that LinkedIn will throttle a post, if you're like the first comment and it's like a us called action link, then it will like dock you for that. Tell me about that, cause that's probably like.

Casey Hill (40:58.967)
Yeah.

John Azoni (41:04.508)
the main strategy. Like it's either Oh, do you post it in the post? Or do you post it in a comment? But you're saying that it's sort of this third way.

Casey Hill (41:15.59)
Yeah, yeah. So first thing that this is actually a really, really important one that I hadn't mentioned before. So definitely everyone should take note of this. Do not post links in your post. First order of business before we even get to the comments. If you post a link in a post, it'll cut your views by 80 to 90%. Right. Like just straight up. Like it is a huge adverse effect. LinkedIn wants to keep people on their platform. They do not want you linking and sending people external to platform. So they heavily, heavily penalize you for doing that. So if you.

really want to share an article, my strong recommendation is to have it incorporated in the comments. But what happened was they saw that people were trying to get around that limitation. Again, remember, LinkedIn wants to keep you on the platform and they saw, well, people heard, I can't put a CTA in the post, so all I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk about it and then I'm gonna say like, see comments and I'm gonna post it in. And that was their way to try to get around that. So LinkedIn is smart. LinkedIn said, if there are no comments on a post and we see that someone did, you know,

basically didn't have a link in the post, but in the first comment, they're gonna treat it the exact same way, and they're gonna hit you with that heavy penalization for that behavior. So I started to study a lot of other creators and like, what are they doing? And you know, like Jason Lemkin is a good example, he's a really influential person in the SaaS space, and I noticed, oh, it's really interesting. He almost always posts call to action links, but he waits until there's four to five comments, and then he hops and he does it. He never does it right away and immediately.

And then I started to talk to more and more creators who are really successful. They all told me the same thing. What we're doing is we wait until there's a handful of comments and only then do we add that CTA. And I think that's a really smart best practice that helps give you the best of both worlds. It's great to have a CTA. It's great to capitalize on a really successful post. Some of my most successful posts will drive hundreds of opt-ins for like a newsletter that I run or something that I wanna push people towards. So I think having CTAs is great, but we have to get in...

increasingly creative to not get hit by those penalties that LinkedIn brings to bear. So yes, don't include it in the post itself and try to make sure that you are not the first comment. And it's funny because I'm teaching a handful of folks about LinkedIn and there's a couple members of our team who just like kept including links, kept including links, and they were struggling. And I kept telling them like don't have any links. And one of the posts that had a link, he actually edited it.

Casey Hill (43:35.594)
after it had a really slow start, he edited the post, removed the link, three hours later, the post is over 10,000. And so it was this remarkable, like just seeing it firsthand start at like 200 views after an hour, he removes a link and suddenly it takes off and hits that inflection point, you know, getting to 10,000 very quickly. And so definitely strong recommendation for people to heed that. That's a pretty important best practice on LinkedIn.

John Azoni (43:41.994)
Wow.

John Azoni (44:01.3)
Well, that makes sense because I recently, cause I break up my podcast episodes into small snippets and I was between like, it takes like extra clicks to schedule out a post that has the link in the comments.

So I'm kind of like, and I looked at my analytics, I'm like, I'm not seeing a difference either way. If I posted it in the comment, or if I post the link to the episode or whatever in the actual post. And that's probably because LinkedIn is probably just treating it the same either way. It's like no different. So Casey, don't look at my LinkedIn post for the next week or so, because they're scheduled stuff. Just it's gonna be the wild west, but you're gonna see a change.

at least with the stuff that comes out with from your episode. No links. Yeah.

Casey Hill (44:51.706)
For sure, and even find someone in your network, find some people you know and let them know. Just say, hey, I'm putting out, like what I'll do, I ran a podcast, CLTV University, and I would take a clip from Riverside, I would post that clip to kind of draw people in, and then I would have either someone on my team or maybe even the person who I was interviewing, they could hop in and they could drop a post and they could link into the full episode. So there's ways too that you can act in that way where you're not even having to be the one where LinkedIn is registering.

Oh, direct link from author instead it's coming in from an outside spot. And so just with a little bit of fast coordination, like people in your network are usually happy if you just say, Hey, would you be willing to send someone a link to the actual thing? Like comment on this post? Sure. Uh, boom, they'll hop in there and they'll do that. But I do want to actually mention that's another, uh, point that I've tested quite a bit, do that for the sake of getting the link on, but don't go to 50 people in your network and say, Hey.

go comment or go like this post with the sense that will make it viral. So I actually ran a really interesting test. I went to, I think it was like, I got over a hundred people from my personal network to comment on a post because I wanted to see like, can I make this thing go viral? So I started sharing with everyone I knew, hey, just did this post and would love if you could go in there and drop some quick thoughts. And that post got heavily throttled. It had like a hundred comments.

John Azoni (46:13.377)
Mmm.

Casey Hill (46:15.126)
but it only had like 40 likes or engagements. So that ratio already looked totally wonked. And the overall post ended up getting like 2000 views. Like it did very, very poorly. And so the learning from that is that LinkedIn, what they do is they distribute to an audience and all of the virality or reach of your post is defined on who LinkedIn serves it to organically. So when you link and you tell someone else to come in and do that, they're literally contributing one view.

John Azoni (46:25.676)
Wow.

Casey Hill (46:45.154)
They're contributing one view. It doesn't change that reach anymore. So it's not to say you can't occasionally have people do that to share important resources or whatever else, but I would definitely caution people that it's not going to give you that reach. LinkedIn has tried hard to get away from this like pods. People used to do LinkedIn engagement pods. I'm gonna grab 20 of my friends and have them all comment in. And so just be cognizant that is not going to be a recipe for virality.

John Azoni (47:04.085)
Yeah.

Casey Hill (47:13.918)
If people don't trust me, go test it yourself and you will see that same result. And so it really is based on how it organically serves it.

John Azoni (47:22.408)
And it makes me think too, they're gonna serve it to, you know, a test group of your followers or whatever, that who you choose to connect with might, I'm just, this is my hypothesis, might make a difference. Cause if you're one of these people that just accepts connection requests from everybody, and you don't think about like, is this person likely to engage in my content? They're, you're.

I would imagine you're very much diluting, you know, the likelihood that you're gonna get people that aren't gonna engage in that pool is very high, you know, when they serve it. Is that true or am I crazy?

Casey Hill (47:58.154)
You're spot on, you're spot on. Yeah, it's a huge thing that I encourage folks is to try to build a network of people that are actually in your ICP, your ideal customer profile, the people you actually wanna serve and you actually wanna speak to. And so, and sometimes people come to me and they're like, well, I'm really worried Casey about posting on LinkedIn cause I have a really small network right now. And I'm like, what a great opportunity.

You don't have a bloated list of 20,000 followers that you got six years ago, when all the craze was just follower count. So you can actually go out and send connection requests to the right key people in your network that makes sense. Like one of the things I might do, because I work a lot in the SaaS world and the partner space, I might go to like all of our key partners, people that I'm working with in my ecosystem. And I might connect with their marketers, connect with their salespeople, connect with the people who my messaging is relevant to.

John Azoni (48:19.797)
Yeah.

John Azoni (48:24.694)
Right.

Casey Hill (48:48.182)
and there's easily thousands of folks that exist in those circles, and now I'm building a very relevant network. Similarly, I accept probably about 10, five to 10% of inbound requests, again, when people are in the same relevant space. So if people are in growth marketing, if people are doing things that are comparable in that world, I'm like, oh, my messaging will actually be valuable to this person. But if they're not, if they reach out and it's like a tax specialist, I'm just like, I don't...

John Azoni (49:12.725)
Mm-hmm.

John Azoni (49:17.289)
Yeah.

Casey Hill (49:17.722)
know that my messaging is going to be really helpful for you, I feel like you're just going to hop in here and pitch me on some sort of service and so then I'm going to reject.

John Azoni (49:26.964)
Well, I feel honored that I'm in the five to 10% that got my connection requests accepted by you. So thanks for that, man. Boost my ego. Yeah, I'm in the process right now of paring down my connection list because I'm in that same thing like six years ago, whatever was just anyone. Just I'm like connecting with anyone.

Casey Hill (49:37.993)
For sure.

John Azoni (49:53.136)
that has, you know, that has ears or eyes to read, you know, and then I'm accepting requests from anyone because of the file or account. Now I'm kind of like, okay, this is actually really hurting me. So it's very tedious process of unconnecting. And unfortunately, there's not an easy way to bulk do that. You know, I wish you could just go and check, and then just like

get rid of all these people, but you really have to do it like one by one, unfortunately. So it's the pain of it's what that's what you get. You know, you're experiencing the pain now of having accepted all these people. Well, man, this has been an awesome conversation. Tell you know, for our audience being people that are

Casey Hill (50:24.894)
Yup. Totally.

John Azoni (50:35.152)
likely to be active campaign users or likely to be close to the people who are active campaign users. Tell us how you know college can college marketing team can benefit from what you guys do.

Casey Hill (50:47.434)
Yeah, for sure. So I think one of the first things is that a lot of teams that I work with have just a very generic, non-segmented, non-personalized email communication strategy. So they are just sending everything to everyone, right? But as we were kind of talking about, there's so many different pockets of interest. If you're sending a bunch of sports updates to people that don't care about sports, that's obviously not landing.

And if you're sending to students who are really interested in the overall culture and the sports, and you're just talking about some STEM education piece, they likewise probably don't care about that. So one of the things I recommend is to build an email strategy that uses things like tags, uses different identifiers, ask some questions upfront and allows you to differentiate as people go through. And one of the things I saw actually just recently from a top university that was really smart.

is they actually just on intake had like four different categories that were like listed out like This newsletter has 40 000 people and we talk exclusively about sports as an example This newsletter talks exclusively about the programs that we have at this university how you can get involved in them Yeah, and like it was just very clear. So people that opt in are only getting what they want to get That's what's going to change you

from being that boilerplate 11% open rate with your huge list of 400,000 people that is super disconnected and has never been purged and has a bunch of old people, right, to something that's more valuable. So I would say at a top level, that would be the place I would start, is finding a tool that makes it easy for you to segment and have some sophistication in those communications. And also, I won't go down the rabbit hole here.

John Azoni (52:10.156)
Mm-hmm.

Casey Hill (52:28.598)
but use some kind of common logics that say, look, if someone is just not opening anything that I'm sending, let's move them. Let's take that person either onto a slower drip or even unsubscribe them altogether if this information isn't valuable. Because you have a reputation as a sender and you're jeopardizing that reputation by having a consistent 10% open rate, you're sending the signals of like, most people don't want to read this, right? So proactively seed people out of those flows.

Ask them questions to try to get engagement. A huge marker that helps you land in primaries is actually reply rate, which is something that most people don't pay attention to. So try to ask targeted questions and create a little bit of engagement and conversation occasionally as you're going through. There's a lot of different best practices and with tools like ActiveCampaign, you can just simply set those logics up so that these systems can provide a much better experience at scale and it can be hands-off.

so you're not constantly having to get in there and tweak and modify it. So yeah, ActiveCampaign.com, or feel free to reach out to me. I'm on LinkedIn, Casey Hill. I post a lot about email, about organic growth, a lot of stuff we were kind of chatting about today. And if anyone wants to connect, feel free to drop me a DM and ask questions either about organic strategy, LinkedIn, or about ActiveCampaign, and I'm happy to speak to it.

John Azoni (53:49.932)
Awesome, man. This has been great. I this is going to be a just a killer episode, I think for our audience. That's much of which is on LinkedIn and a lot of practical tips here. So appreciate you being here.

Casey Hill (54:00.946)
Awesome, thanks so much, y'all, this was great.

John Azoni (54:02.452)
Yeah. All right. We'll end the recording there. Yeah, dude, that was awesome. Thanks. This was fun.

Casey Hill (54:10.014)
Yeah, yeah, it was great. I enjoyed the conversation. Hopefully I think we gave a good amount of kind of like specific takeaways. And I think like one of the things I think about with podcasting is like. Sound bite moments, and hopefully we had a good number of like pretty specific stuff we got into in some of these sections that will have a lot of those styles of clips that you can share. And I'm happy to share too. Like I always tell people with Riverside, if you're, if you curate any of those specific clips.

send them over and I'm happy to have there be promotion distribution on my team's end, both from me, but we also have this thing called advocacy where we can share content internally and it like routes it to the whole team can go in and grab clips. So I was just on a podcast recently and we had like seven members of our team all shared the episode with that little snippet. So that was a cool way just to make it really easy for our team to kind of amplify. So long story short, I always tell people the more clips and options.

you send over the more that my team can have collateral to work with and make content with

John Azoni (55:08.256)
That's awesome. Yeah, my editor usually pulls about 10 or so clips and maybe even more from this. Usually when there's like very point by point like practical stuff, there's a wealth of that stuff. So I'll send you that Google Drive folder. You guys can do whatever you want with it. And yeah.

Casey Hill (55:25.858)
Cool, awesome. Well, yeah, again, thanks again for the chat and look forward to staying connected. Cool, cheers, bye.

John Azoni (55:30.456)
All right, man, take care. All right, bye bye.